AirAsia CEO Deletes His Facebook Account to Protest Circulation of New Zealand's Mass Shooting Video

Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian airline company AirAsia's CEO Tony Fernandes has deleted his Facebook account over the circulation of a video of Friday's mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch that claimed 50 lives, saying the social media giant needs to "clean up" and it "could have done more to stop" such hatred on online platforms, according to a media report.

A horrific video shot by the gunman who carried out the mosque massacre was livestreamed on Facebook before being removed by the company. But the stream, lasting 17 minutes, was shared repeatedly on YouTube and Twitter, and internet platforms were scrambling to remove videos being reposted of the gruesome scenes.

In a series of tweets on Sunday, Fernandes, who had 670,000 followers, said though he was a "social media fan", the livestream caused him to leave Facebook, the CNN reported.

"The amount of hate that goes on in social media sometimes outweighs the good...Facebook could have done more to stop some of this...17 mins of a live stream of killing and hate!!!! Its need to clean up and not just think of financials," he tweeted.

On Saturday, Facebook said it removed 1.5 million videos of the attack.

Soon after cancelling his Facebook account, the CEO tweeted, "It is a great platform to communicate...Strong engagement and very useful but New Zealand was too much for me to take along with all the other issues."

Fernandes, who has nearly 1.3 million Twitter followers and has sent more than 20,000 tweets, said he was also contemplating to leave the microblogging site, but "on Twitter I think the battle for me goes on."